One of my New Year resolutions was to write down all the recipes I want to add to my upcoming book. So I’ve done it and now it’s time to test everything that was planned and to post the results here. Let me start with rosemary and olives focaccia.

A few notes. There are plenty of focaccia recipes that use baking powder, which seems “very wrong” to me as it’s only sour dough that gives focaccia that special taste. Then, there are a lot of people who are afraid of yeast and sour dough. Well, sour dough requires some more efforts in comparison with baking powder or “self rising flour”, but commercial yeast makes its work so perfect that it’s hard to make a mistake. Hope I motivated you at least a little bit. And finally: I found that you can make focaccia with plain spelt flour which is in a way healthier choice than white wheat flour. Try it 🙂
( 🇸🇰 slovenský preklad nájdete za anglickým textom)

Ingredients

(makes 2 focaccias)

20g of fresh yeast

250g of milk

400g of spelt flour (plain or marked as T812 if you are in EU)

2 tsp of salt

1 tsp of sugar

1 tsp of dry rosemary powder

pinch of garlic powder

5 tbs olive oil

fresh rosemary (can be substituted by dry rosemary leaves)

pitted olives (whole or sliced) for topping. Can’t tell you how many olives you will need as it’s a matter of taste, you can cover the whole focaccia top or use just a few of them.

Directions.

Enjoy the yeast magic! 🙂 Make a starter: melt yeast in slightly warm milk (no more than 40C or yeast will die) in a clean bowl or glass, add 2 tbs of flour, 1 tsp of sugar cover the bowl with a paper tower and place to a warm place for 15-20 minutes. I place the starter on the stone near a burner on a low heat (but not to close, as, I mentioned, yeast will die if the temperature is too high).

Prepare the dough. Combine 300g of flour with 1 tsp of salt, 3 tbs of olive oil and both herbs. Why do we do it like that? Because salt can slow down or even kill yeast so we will add only 1 tsp of salt at this step.

Combine this mixture with the grown starter, knead the dough for 10 minutes until it becomes smooth. Spelt flour is a bit more sticky than white flour so it’s good to use a food processor for kneading.

Cover the dough with a towel, place it to a warm place and let it grow twice. (It will take up to 30 minutes)

Add 100g of flour and 1 tsp of salt to the bowl with grown dough and knead the dough again for 10 minutes. Divide the dough into 2 balls. I have 2 round trays with 24cm in diameter so I rolled up the dough to this size. Transfer the rolled dough to the trays, grease tops with the rest of olive oil, sprinkle rosemary leaves and a little bit of seasoning and press olives to the dough.

Bake 15 minutes in the oven preheated to 250C until slightly golden top.

P.S. you can add a few spoons of sweet canned corn to the dough or make tomatoes topping.